Freckle is less than thrilled with this new arrangement, but Rocky talks him into it on the ride home. Rocky always talks him into it.

"Oh, ease up, Freckle-face!" he says to him, cutting a very sharp turn at a very wide intersection. "There's nothing to feel anxious about! Ol' Vinegar won't lay a finger on you- at least not now. Between debilitating injury and the prospect of further provoking Miss Pepper's ire now that she's caught on to his hijinks, his great shovel-ish hands are fortuitously tied. Besides, this is a splendid opportunity for some quality bonding time between you two knuckleheads! It'll be swell!"

Rocky's right on the mark on that first point. Even Viktor recognizes the need for subtlety here. He cannot deal with this new boy in the conventional manner, at least not if he and Ivy are to remain on speaking terms for the foreseeable future. But what the brawny tom also knows, and what Rocky failed to mention to his hapless cousin, is that he possesses far more devastating means of assault than even his infamous walloping. Freckle finds that out the hard way.

Viktor berates him constantly, over mistakes real or imagined. He yells at him, declares him a useless little leprechaun (his pronunciation of the word is something Calvin might have found amusing under different circumstances) and gruffly directs him to his next task with a stern warning not to fuck that up as well. But he always does, even if he doesn't, and the cycle begins anew.

Tormenting the boy quickly becomes Viktor's most gratifying pastime, the most enjoyable part of what he's come to view as his daily responsibilities, and he commits to it with gusto for the five long afternoons it takes before the lorry is finally deemed unsalvageable and promptly broken down for scraps. Viktor expected him to have run off with his tail between his legs long before that point, but much to his surprise, this spineless whelp endures his abuse all the way to the end with nary a word of protest.

It would seem he has more sense than Chad, this one. How unfortunate.

For his part, Freckle comes out of that harrowing workweek with sore arms, callused hands, a modest amount of residual engine grime under his claws that won't fully come off until another week of intense scrubbing and several fatal blows to his self-esteem, yet strangely enough, he finds he has mixed feelings about reaching the end of this tentative collaboration. The ceaseless intimidation and extensive Slovak cursing are some things he could happily do without, of course, but at the same time this is the kind of work he prefers to be engaged in, the kind that doesn't start eating away at him the second he puts his tools down. It's repairing rather than breaking, creating rather than destroying; it is tiring, useful work blissfully devoid of manslaughter, and in a vacuum he would even go so far as to call it honest.

Indeed, his experience in that garage has been damn near wholesome by recent standards, when he thinks about it that way; and God knows he could use a little wholesome in his life right about now.

Perhaps this is why, when Mitzi pulls him aside the morning after and asks if he could keep helping out in the garage when he's not too busy running errands together with his cousin, just for a little while longer until poor Viktor can fully recover, he reluctantly acquiesces. As for the man himself, he's simply thankful for the opportunity to finish what he started and scare this unexpectedly tenacious whippersnapper away like he had the rest of Ivy's misbegotten flings.

So Freckle continues to visit the garage every other day or so to spend a few hours tinkering with failing motors and being relentlessly glowered at, until eventually it becomes routine. By the time Viktor finally removes the last of his bandages for good, there is a tacit understanding that this uneasy partnership of theirs has been extended indefinitely, injuries notwithstanding.

There will be no more saving bells from this point on. Now it is a battle of attrition.